“Congratulations Malawians!” The Africa’s academic icon and world-towering economist Professor Adebayo Adedeji last night awed Malawians for their hard work, wonders in economic performance and food production. He was speaking at dinner hosted last night in his honour by President Bingu wa Mutharika at the New State House in Lilongwe.
That night, 14 December 2008, the mood was eloquent and arresting as the world sat down to listen. The flavor of the room was sweet, the background music soft, but the message was rich, loud and clear. “This country has virtually beaten everybody on the African continent in food production,” said Professor Adebayo Adedeji.
Earlier, the hosting Malawi leader had proudly described Malawi as “probably the best managed economy in the sub-Saharan Africa.” This is not a vain boast but a fact. “Malawi is a miracle economy,” but Mutharika hasted to openly add, “This is not my coinage but these are the words of World Bank and IMF.”
In the final analysis of his address, Professor Adebayo Adedeji came to witness and to agree that “Malawi is a miracle economy.” This academic colossus has compared Malawi’s historic phenomenal growth rate at 8% as equal to that of China arguing that “Malawi is certainly on its way to progress”. The Professor challenged that not even the African largest economy of South Africa growing at 3% compares with the rate at which Malawi rising. Europe was growing at the rate of 2.5% rate when it was undergoing a revolution of development, he observed.
Professor Adebayo Adedeji is well-thought-of in economic scholarship and leadership. He is an authority who has served as United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary to the United Nations Commission for Africa. He is the Chairman of African Peer Review Mechanism. His visit and choice of Malawi are symbolic.
Tonight, he had this to confess with admiration, “I have been closely following the developments [in Malawi] particularly since my brother Bingu wa Mutharika took over the leadership.”
The African academic icon said he was “attracted” to visit Malawi which he and the Governor of the Ogun State Otheba Benga Daniel coincidentally found Malawi “worthy visiting” for lessons and forging partnership after describing Malawi as a benchmark for others.
The elderly Professor Adebayo Adedeji spoke with well-humoured humility, wisdom, perceptive hindsight and deep insight. He said Malawi’s record progress is that of the people and not Mutharika alone. “Nobody can claim 100% perfection. But society has the right to seek perfection in a leader who provides inspiration. I hope you will continue to support him,” Adedeji said.
Mutharika has himself attributed Malawi’s progress and the world-wide recognition that come home in medals, torches and titles to all Malawians. Professor Adebayo Adedeji did not just thank us for the dinner, he said, “Congratulations to you all.”
We may not agree with Mutharika in our right to fault-finding, in our political and analytical biases, but we cannot disagree with the independent congratulations, recognition and honours that come to us – we the people of Malawi.
Also available at http://www.mazikotimes.com
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Friday, November 21, 2008
Madona's Mission to Malawi
Unreserved love and motherly care, that is what the word ‘Madonna’ has come to mean since Leonardo da Vinci painted Mary the mother of Jesus in fine and colour. The image of Madonna is always associated with motherly love for children and the world. Madonna has become a symbol.
But Madonna the celebrated musician is different, you may think. Perhaps, wrong. Whatever the celebrity’s controversies, the musician loves children. She adopted David Phiri from Malawi, not that Madonna thinks too poorly of Malawians that they could not raise the orphan. But Madonna is making a statement to the world, “We care for others at least as much as we care for ourselves,” she has recently said in her mission to Malawi.
In her letter to the world posted through her website, she says, “After witnessing the potential of Malawi's girls firsthand, I made it my mission to give them an opportunity to become their personal best.” Now she has set out to build what will be probably the best school for the African girl child in Malawi. The Madonna founded project is called “Raising Malawi Academy for Girls.”
“Raising Malawi Academy for Girls is founded upon the belief that empowering a small group of exceptional individuals can ignite a positive change for a whole nation, and indeed for the entire world,” Madonna writes. Her spirit is that of striving “to transform the African nation of Malawi through the education and empowerment of its young women,” and that is the core of her mission.
Known for their hard work, politeness, peace and smiles, Malawians themselves respect women – even amidst a militating patriarchal culture and gender-based violence. They celebrate Mother’s Day once a year to remember the love of our mothers. It is now common to hear them loudly believing, “Teach a woman, and you have taught the nation” because they believe that the woman is the heart of the home and the nation. This is what poverty and relics of some traditional beliefs want to defeat. There remain many girls, particularly among the low income rural Malawians who are denied the opportunity to become the best of themselves. It is that setback that Madonna is fighting to conquer.
In her very quieter life away from the hubbub and glittering colour of the stage life, and perhaps in her deep contrition, Madonna holds “near and dear” the values of human integrity and the binds of communal life.
Behind that stage Madonna, there is the human Madonna who agrees with the African philosophy of life. That is why, she says, her mission is “founded on the spirit of Umunthu”. Yes, in Chichewa the vernacular of Malawi “Umunthu means "I am because we are".
In her letter to the world posted through her website, she says, “After witnessing the potential of Malawi's girls firsthand, I made it my mission to give them an opportunity to become their personal best.” Now she has set out to build what will be probably the best school for the African girl child in Malawi. The Madonna founded project is called “Raising Malawi Academy for Girls.”
“Raising Malawi Academy for Girls is founded upon the belief that empowering a small group of exceptional individuals can ignite a positive change for a whole nation, and indeed for the entire world,” Madonna writes. Her spirit is that of striving “to transform the African nation of Malawi through the education and empowerment of its young women,” and that is the core of her mission.
Known for their hard work, politeness, peace and smiles, Malawians themselves respect women – even amidst a militating patriarchal culture and gender-based violence. They celebrate Mother’s Day once a year to remember the love of our mothers. It is now common to hear them loudly believing, “Teach a woman, and you have taught the nation” because they believe that the woman is the heart of the home and the nation. This is what poverty and relics of some traditional beliefs want to defeat. There remain many girls, particularly among the low income rural Malawians who are denied the opportunity to become the best of themselves. It is that setback that Madonna is fighting to conquer.
In her very quieter life away from the hubbub and glittering colour of the stage life, and perhaps in her deep contrition, Madonna holds “near and dear” the values of human integrity and the binds of communal life.
Behind that stage Madonna, there is the human Madonna who agrees with the African philosophy of life. That is why, she says, her mission is “founded on the spirit of Umunthu”. Yes, in Chichewa the vernacular of Malawi “Umunthu means "I am because we are".
It has been in their valued wisdom for ages for the people of Malawi to believe that “It is human intercourse that makes us human, he who is solitary is a beast”. That is precisely what one of their proverbs, in their language (Ali awiri ndi anthu, kalikokha nkanyama). But the individual is the nucleus of the Umunthu philosophy, and Madonna’s “Academy is dedicated to inspiring within each student a sense of global and individual responsibility.”
In its full mission, the Raising Malawi academy envisions character and intellectual sharpening of the girl at the very heart, nucleus and engine of Malawi’s society and progress. The Academy is set to provide girls with the means “to realize the full range of their intellectual, spiritual, creative, and human potential; to act as examples of girls' empowerment and gender equity; to foster Malawian cultural pride and responsibility; to provide innovative opportunities for sustainability; and to raise the nation of Malawi and its people to abundance and lasting health.”
This is where fame, name and money has brought Mother Madonna – Malawi. Perhaps she too shares the global confidence that Malawi is not just where every dollar counts, but now a place where every dollar is a seed that bears fruit with the present sound economic management. But this mission is far beyond fame, name and money because it takes your heart too. And that is the integrity of it.
It is upon this noble mission that Madonna has called all her friends to partake. The celebrated mother and musician invites all those of goodwill and with Africa at heart to http://www.raisingmalawi.org/rm_girlsacademy.php where “every dollar makes a difference,” she says. Mother of David the Malawian child, Madonna speaks in a manner that reminds one of Jesus the son of Virgin Mary who said “It is better to give than to receive.” Now Madonna believes, “by giving our best, we become our best.”
In its full mission, the Raising Malawi academy envisions character and intellectual sharpening of the girl at the very heart, nucleus and engine of Malawi’s society and progress. The Academy is set to provide girls with the means “to realize the full range of their intellectual, spiritual, creative, and human potential; to act as examples of girls' empowerment and gender equity; to foster Malawian cultural pride and responsibility; to provide innovative opportunities for sustainability; and to raise the nation of Malawi and its people to abundance and lasting health.”
This is where fame, name and money has brought Mother Madonna – Malawi. Perhaps she too shares the global confidence that Malawi is not just where every dollar counts, but now a place where every dollar is a seed that bears fruit with the present sound economic management. But this mission is far beyond fame, name and money because it takes your heart too. And that is the integrity of it.
It is upon this noble mission that Madonna has called all her friends to partake. The celebrated mother and musician invites all those of goodwill and with Africa at heart to http://www.raisingmalawi.org/rm_girlsacademy.php where “every dollar makes a difference,” she says. Mother of David the Malawian child, Madonna speaks in a manner that reminds one of Jesus the son of Virgin Mary who said “It is better to give than to receive.” Now Madonna believes, “by giving our best, we become our best.”
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
REGIONALSIM AND THE UNIVERSITY IN MALAWI
LETTER TO MY BELOVED STUDENT
Dear Ephraim Nyondo,
Your letter is more than eloquent, and I was struck speechless over the last two days of my silence. I am delighted you have come of age enough to see, as you say in your email, the Chancellor College demonstrations for and against University Quota System selection had regionalism fanning the furnace of the cause.
Your letter is more than eloquent, and I was struck speechless over the last two days of my silence. I am delighted you have come of age enough to see, as you say in your email, the Chancellor College demonstrations for and against University Quota System selection had regionalism fanning the furnace of the cause.
My response is, yes, regionalism is a time-ticking b
omb in Malawi. It is time to warn ourselves before we relapse into the recent Kenyan and Rwandan mayhem and bloodbaths still dripping in our memory. The youth need the right and honest education that sets the right frame of mind, NOW more than ever!
omb in Malawi. It is time to warn ourselves before we relapse into the recent Kenyan and Rwandan mayhem and bloodbaths still dripping in our memory. The youth need the right and honest education that sets the right frame of mind, NOW more than ever!It also sickens me a lot to see intellectuals who should have liberated your generations from these prison walls of regionalism themselves steeped deep in baying for the blood of those who want it erased. There are those who practice regionalism in very silent and crafty means, and there are those who are condemned and crucified for naming the practice in public. As a result, we are forbidden from speaking of it in public while its cancer slowly spreads to our tumours of reason, spreading into our intellectuals and spreading into our young intellectuals. Who will save us? Who will teach us the right path?
At the height of MCP rule, we practically sidelined Northerners and practically told "you" to go back to the North. Professionals, teachers in particular, were sent to their regions. The perception was that Northerners are rouble-rousers and trouble makers. The area was neglected in development and the result was that people from the North started looking for ways of self-assertion.
When some brave Chancellor College students protested in the famous "Come Come And Mend" poem (which meant the Chitukuko Cha Amayi Mmalawi -- CCAM) had to come and clean the mess they had left at Chantunga Ground after one of their functions, John Tembo was Chairman of the University Council and was resolved not only expelling the poets (banishing them from the Republic in a Platonic fashion), but he was also ready to cut out all students from the North from the University of Malawi on account that they too were the rouble-rousers.
When Chakufwa Chihana came, he led a national political party which was quickly folded into the bedroom of the North. Throughout the Muluzi times, political parties became regional football clubs, with minimal political inter-marriages. Our voter behaviour can certainly testify.
Up until now, a Chewa will not easily be allowed to marry in the North by cultural perceptions of norms and we have slowly looked at our Northern in-laws with suspicion here in the Central and South.
Up until now, a Chewa will not easily be allowed to marry in the North by cultural perceptions of norms and we have slowly looked at our Northern in-laws with suspicion here in the Central and South.
Even the Livingstonia and Nkhoma Synods have been divided over what has serious religious overtones. When an entire congregation in the Chewa Central Region decides to sing its hymns in Tumbuka because it because this branch belongs to Livingstonia Synod, a nasty head of regional identity has reared out in a wrong place – hasn’t it?
With all the massive effort the Roman Catholic Church has demonstrated worldwide in establishing education, more so demonstrably in Malawi, the Catholic University of Malawi is failing to take off because (what every honest Malawian will tell you) the Catholic (universal) Church does not want to support the regionalistic spirit that is budding in the administration of the university. That university is literally crawling, with only a ream of paper for the survival of an entire department per month once. Part-time teachers have been known to be Head of Departments there. If you studied a subject up to Third Year a the University of Malawi, you are allowed to teach it at the Catholic University of Malawi even if you never specialised therefore. The tuition is rising, and Government has not yet recoginsed them. What happens to those who are about to graduate without any recognition on the market place?
There have been efforts to limit regional-based access to resources of course. The selection from Primary to Secondary School is already premised on a Quota System principle because every district is meant to have Government secondary schools that draw from the district as its education catchment area and these schools are supposed to relate the population sizes of the district, at least on the premise of this principle. This was meant to ensure that every district accesses secondary school education as part (just part) of spreading development.
Some of us are totally confused with the reasoning those (even intellectuals) that refuse the same principle being already applied at our Primary-into-Secondary School level national-wide. Yet, when this debate popped up at Chancellor College Academic email forum, the reasons became very clear. Even those academics you would have wished to admire clearly and openly said the North is benefiting from the present system and they are not ready for any reversals. I am saying this because the pro- and against arguments were equally divided on regional identities and THIS IS ON RECORD of the emails that circulated at that time. Not the type of debates I jump in, and I wrote no single email on that. This is the thinking we seem to have given our students, and this a generation of Malawi who should be challenged to build ONE MALAWI.
What is also on record is that the present system of intake is very preferential and differentially baffling. The data is available at the University Office and with a good number of your lecturers. When you compare district population sizes against the total number of Malawians selected for the University in 5 years, in my humblest words, it sobers you up. You begin to say, "wait a minute!" Is this the Malawi my generation wants to build? Really?
I must conclude by repeating that there are those who practice regionalism, and there are those who are demonised for saying so in public. I will not be surprised if this letter finds its way in the hands of those who will crucify me because they refuse to hear the truth.
But as long as I am a poet, I will take the truth to the public places. So long as I write, I will serve truth at the dinner of those who dance to lies. Above all, I have always cared to say these things to those students whom I love and care about, like yourself because it is upon your generation to cure what our ancestors made worse.
This is what I say to my beloved students like you: WE HAVE NO MORAL REASON TO LIVE THE WRONGS OF OUR FOREFATHERS WHILE WE CANNOT.
From the deep wells of flowing love,
Bright
From the deep wells of flowing love,
Bright
Thursday, September 18, 2008
SPIRIT OF AFRICA: Healing Zimbabwe
Speaking of the daemonic act of Osama bin Laden’s sending America’s towers of civilization down into rubble, dust and ashes, Nancy Gibbs had this to write. “If you want to humble an empire, then it makes sense to maim its cathedrals that symbolize our faith”. But bin Laden failed to break the faith and resolve of the Americans, she concludes.
Speaking of Zimbabwe after the economic rubble, dust and ashes of those burnt alive, this is what we must write. If you want to humble an empire, then it makes sense to maim its very spirit. But the Chimurenga spirit of Zimbabwe was never maimed, and the African spirit of communalism glowed with a hallo of hope and resolve by day throughout the long drawn funeral of the Zimbabwe situation.
Zimbabwe has lived a long story – the flourishing Great Zimbabwe of Africa that was intensively trading with China and Middle East while Europe was in the Dark Ages; British colonialism with land, gold and diamond exploitation; guerilla war against imperialism; then the long seasons of rest and economic flourish plunging into bloodbaths of political violence; and brutality followed by a complete collapse of economic and social infrastructure. Horror! Horror! Horror! What is more than a national funeral?
But no matter how long and winding a river might be, it must water into something greater than itself some day. It is the way of all flesh. Now the Government and Opposition have signed a power-sharing deal to reconstruct our motherland. And there is a grain of hope planted.
But things were that bad. One university lecturer told me he received 4.2 trillion Zimbabwe Dollars per month by around August 2008. But this could only buy just about eight loaves of bread “if you are lucky to find it,” he added. “We eat bread probably once in every three months.” This means a shirt that cost 8 trillion Zim Dollars would have the university lecturer work for it for two living months, not to speak of French made shoes costing 72 trillion that he must work for in Lord knows how many years. What about the messenger and the village widow? What was life like? Hell!
There are untold stories, and dirges unsung, funerals not mourned and the dead never buried. Mugabe is right, “Let us not ignore the truth as we proceed,” speaking on the signing of the power-sharing deal. The truth is, Comrade Mugabe’s war against his own people went too far, just too far.
Come March 2007, three senior defence force officers died in succession, possibly in a political purge following rumours of a coup d’état. Probably something like what happened in Malawi when in the Dzineso, Njoloma and Chigawa deaths came mysteriously under Bakili Muluzi! After rumours of a coup in Malawi, in the midst of Muluzi's "Bloodstained Democracy". But the difference, Zimbabwean souls were declared national heroes when ironically, as whispers have it; two were given lethal injections in hospital while the third died mysteriously in a car-train accident.
In March 2007, when Zimbabwe was not on a physical war with any other country, a Reserve Army was formed and gazette “ordering war veterans not above 50 years to register with Ministry of Defence so that they could be given arms at any time when the Commander-in-Chief deems it fit.” Why?
Yet, this is another untold story – that of the Chimurenga spirit behind the war veterans. During the Chimurenga Wars of liberation against British imperialist at its heist of colonialism, the people collectively sang and believed in Chimurenga Songs. They were, in the words of Alec Pongweni, “the soul and binding force of the people”. These songs built a common sense of identity against “the unacceptable face of imperialism.” Mugabe fought a good fight, but he has oppressed his own people with unacceptable horror and style.
What Mugabe has done throughout the unacceptable face of his dictatorship has been to draw upon this spirit by continuing to present Britain and America as the same imperialist who “was there yesterday, and is here with us today”. In so doing, Mugabe has drawn a common sense of alliance on his side against even those Zimbabwean political leaders said to be possible puppets of the West – Tsvangirai.
The Chimurenga Songs, with their popular appeal and inspiration, carried a shared spirit of struggle and sworn allegiance to the man who saved them. This is the spirit that has ensured Mugabe’s political survival, and there were those who were ready to die for him. There were those to whom he remained a popular god-father much as he was hated and demonized by others. But they feared him as well, and fear has been his weapon too. Yes, the motives of his loyalists are complex. He used the war veterans to make a system by giving them posts and privileges everywhere in Government.
In this way, Mugabe avoided repeating the history of East Africa. In Kenya, that sight of horror still dripping in our memory began with those maimed in the soul in the post-independence frustration of having shed blood in the Kenyan Mau Mau struggle against colonialism only to be left out of sharing the national cake by their own brotherly leaders, their own comrades.
The violent blood bathed explosion of the recent Kenyan situation sprung from the deep recesses of ethnic emotions with counter-accusations that some ethnic groups are sitting on the national cake more than others. It is “not just about politics as witnessed in other areas”, says US Ambassador Michael Ranneberger. The wise and illustrious Archbishop Desmond Tutu and AU Chairman President John Kufour of Ghana quietly saw the depth of it all.
In fact, Kenyan Prime Mininster Raila Odinga whipped up the divided ethnic sentiments into campaign propaganda. It was overwhelmingly felt by other communities that “the Kikuyus are selfish bigots dedicated to tribal hegemony and will never share spoils of government with other communities”, says Odinga’s pre-elections strategy paper called Positioning and Marketing ODM and the People’s President Raila Odinga. The Kikuyus are Kenya’s largest ethnic group that has been controlling a huge clump of economy and power in the post-independent Kenya – after the Mau Mau common cause for political and economic liberation from colonialism.
The feeling of betrayal, alienation, frustration and desperation in those who fought for independence but were left out of the spoils of the war has been there since 1960s. It is the story of betrayed hope in A Grain of Wheat that never germinated (told in 1967), of Petals of Blood (1977) and the beauty of shedding blossoming blood for their land, the story of the Black Messiah who turns out to be, not a saving Christ, but a Devil on the Cross (1982); and the story of Matigari (1987) – the betrayed patriots who fought for independence returning with decided revenge.
In all these four novels spanning decades, the African literary colossus called Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been pocking into the same post-independence feelings. It is the feeling of heart broken yearning, “I am nothing because I have nothing” as one Tanzanian poet forcefully puts it.
Mugabe dodged walking this Kenyan path with the war veterans. And he rewarded them in excess and built an unshakable wall of loyalty around him by those who shared a common identity of anti-imperialists, a common cause to die for their land and a political consciousness of Mugabe as the father – and you only have one father in life. Mugabe constructed a whole culture into which his dictatorship found roots.
Of course, the Zimbabwe conflict was nothing of a clash of deeply divided sentiments as was in Kenya or Rwanda. It was just one massive brutal force of government machinery let loose upon the powerless who decided that Mugabe had done his part, and that he had to go democratically. That is why Zimbabwe did not have a people-against-people type of clashes. That is also why Zimbabwe should be easier to heal. The people share much more in common than in division. And my Zimbabwe will heal.
Times of the struggle came and went with confusion of leadership at times. And the songs went “Vaparidzi vawanda / Hatichavizi wekutevera / Honai Baba tadzungaira” to mean “There are too many preachers in Zimbabwe / We no longer know which one to listen to. / Lord, we are thoroughly confused.” After the victory and the war was done, The Green Arrows sang, “Mr. Mugabe is now in control, / Now we know who to follow. / Behold Lord, we have been liberated.”
These Chimurnga Songs planted something deep into the hearts of the people with the all excitement of liberation what their eyes had seen of colonial oppression. As Malawians proverbially put it, “What gets into the ears spreads a mat in the heart” (Kadalowa mkhutu kadayala mphatsa) and “What the eye has seen the heart cannot forsake” (Chaona maso mtima suiwala). They saw the oppression and heard the songs.
That is the power of Chimurenga Songs, and the power of popular culture in planting political ideology. It plants what generations cannot easily dislodge. And Comrade Robert Mugabe’s legacy of survival cannot go without what happened to the hearts of Zimbabweans in the secret rooms of their souls from the Chimurenga War of liberation across their calm and stormy waters of the times that followed.
Mugabe seems to have discovered a secret which African leaders are yet to fully see, the power of using culture to govern hearts of a nation. This is what Terry Eagleton speaks of in his book called The Idea of Culture. “To govern successfully, [we] must therefore understand men and women in their secret desires and aversions, not just in their voting habits and social aspirations. If [we are] to regulate them from inside, it must also imagine them from inside”.
Gathering loyalty and votes goes beyond studying “voting habits” and gauging what the electorates aspire for. This is the Malawi Congress Party has remained a significantly solid party at the seams despite being led by people with neither repute, charisma nor vision as Gwanda Chakwamba and John Tembo have been. The party was made a political norm among the Chewa admirable for our Gule Wamkulu secret society culture that rallies a common sense of identity now being whipped into political identity.
This is what culture can do, writes Eagleton. British Colonisation used culture to conquer our spirit. They used literature in the schools and language (these mirrors and vehicles of culture) to make Africans feel that European life was the norm and our African way of living was abnormal. Norms are necessarily cultural. And their legacy now made part of our norms today stubbornly refuses to go.
Mugabe used the spirit of popular culture to make himself popular with those that shared a common heart of Chimurenga struggle against Western exploitation of gold, diamonds and land. Common sense now says the richer an African country is in minerals, the more it will be a site of conflict – often involving the hand of invisible forces beyond Africa.
And Mugabe appealed to the sympathy of the region by invoking that which had spread a mat in the hearts of African leaders, something deep in our history, something deeper than the bottom of the soul – the sensitivity of land and Western exploitation.
Speaking of Zimbabwe after the economic rubble, dust and ashes of those burnt alive, this is what we must write. If you want to humble an empire, then it makes sense to maim its very spirit. But the Chimurenga spirit of Zimbabwe was never maimed, and the African spirit of communalism glowed with a hallo of hope and resolve by day throughout the long drawn funeral of the Zimbabwe situation.
Zimbabwe has lived a long story – the flourishing Great Zimbabwe of Africa that was intensively trading with China and Middle East while Europe was in the Dark Ages; British colonialism with land, gold and diamond exploitation; guerilla war against imperialism; then the long seasons of rest and economic flourish plunging into bloodbaths of political violence; and brutality followed by a complete collapse of economic and social infrastructure. Horror! Horror! Horror! What is more than a national funeral?
But no matter how long and winding a river might be, it must water into something greater than itself some day. It is the way of all flesh. Now the Government and Opposition have signed a power-sharing deal to reconstruct our motherland. And there is a grain of hope planted.
But things were that bad. One university lecturer told me he received 4.2 trillion Zimbabwe Dollars per month by around August 2008. But this could only buy just about eight loaves of bread “if you are lucky to find it,” he added. “We eat bread probably once in every three months.” This means a shirt that cost 8 trillion Zim Dollars would have the university lecturer work for it for two living months, not to speak of French made shoes costing 72 trillion that he must work for in Lord knows how many years. What about the messenger and the village widow? What was life like? Hell!
There are untold stories, and dirges unsung, funerals not mourned and the dead never buried. Mugabe is right, “Let us not ignore the truth as we proceed,” speaking on the signing of the power-sharing deal. The truth is, Comrade Mugabe’s war against his own people went too far, just too far.
Come March 2007, three senior defence force officers died in succession, possibly in a political purge following rumours of a coup d’état. Probably something like what happened in Malawi when in the Dzineso, Njoloma and Chigawa deaths came mysteriously under Bakili Muluzi! After rumours of a coup in Malawi, in the midst of Muluzi's "Bloodstained Democracy". But the difference, Zimbabwean souls were declared national heroes when ironically, as whispers have it; two were given lethal injections in hospital while the third died mysteriously in a car-train accident.
In March 2007, when Zimbabwe was not on a physical war with any other country, a Reserve Army was formed and gazette “ordering war veterans not above 50 years to register with Ministry of Defence so that they could be given arms at any time when the Commander-in-Chief deems it fit.” Why?
Yet, this is another untold story – that of the Chimurenga spirit behind the war veterans. During the Chimurenga Wars of liberation against British imperialist at its heist of colonialism, the people collectively sang and believed in Chimurenga Songs. They were, in the words of Alec Pongweni, “the soul and binding force of the people”. These songs built a common sense of identity against “the unacceptable face of imperialism.” Mugabe fought a good fight, but he has oppressed his own people with unacceptable horror and style.
What Mugabe has done throughout the unacceptable face of his dictatorship has been to draw upon this spirit by continuing to present Britain and America as the same imperialist who “was there yesterday, and is here with us today”. In so doing, Mugabe has drawn a common sense of alliance on his side against even those Zimbabwean political leaders said to be possible puppets of the West – Tsvangirai.
The Chimurenga Songs, with their popular appeal and inspiration, carried a shared spirit of struggle and sworn allegiance to the man who saved them. This is the spirit that has ensured Mugabe’s political survival, and there were those who were ready to die for him. There were those to whom he remained a popular god-father much as he was hated and demonized by others. But they feared him as well, and fear has been his weapon too. Yes, the motives of his loyalists are complex. He used the war veterans to make a system by giving them posts and privileges everywhere in Government.
In this way, Mugabe avoided repeating the history of East Africa. In Kenya, that sight of horror still dripping in our memory began with those maimed in the soul in the post-independence frustration of having shed blood in the Kenyan Mau Mau struggle against colonialism only to be left out of sharing the national cake by their own brotherly leaders, their own comrades.
The violent blood bathed explosion of the recent Kenyan situation sprung from the deep recesses of ethnic emotions with counter-accusations that some ethnic groups are sitting on the national cake more than others. It is “not just about politics as witnessed in other areas”, says US Ambassador Michael Ranneberger. The wise and illustrious Archbishop Desmond Tutu and AU Chairman President John Kufour of Ghana quietly saw the depth of it all.
In fact, Kenyan Prime Mininster Raila Odinga whipped up the divided ethnic sentiments into campaign propaganda. It was overwhelmingly felt by other communities that “the Kikuyus are selfish bigots dedicated to tribal hegemony and will never share spoils of government with other communities”, says Odinga’s pre-elections strategy paper called Positioning and Marketing ODM and the People’s President Raila Odinga. The Kikuyus are Kenya’s largest ethnic group that has been controlling a huge clump of economy and power in the post-independent Kenya – after the Mau Mau common cause for political and economic liberation from colonialism.
The feeling of betrayal, alienation, frustration and desperation in those who fought for independence but were left out of the spoils of the war has been there since 1960s. It is the story of betrayed hope in A Grain of Wheat that never germinated (told in 1967), of Petals of Blood (1977) and the beauty of shedding blossoming blood for their land, the story of the Black Messiah who turns out to be, not a saving Christ, but a Devil on the Cross (1982); and the story of Matigari (1987) – the betrayed patriots who fought for independence returning with decided revenge.
In all these four novels spanning decades, the African literary colossus called Ngugi wa Thiong’o has been pocking into the same post-independence feelings. It is the feeling of heart broken yearning, “I am nothing because I have nothing” as one Tanzanian poet forcefully puts it.
Mugabe dodged walking this Kenyan path with the war veterans. And he rewarded them in excess and built an unshakable wall of loyalty around him by those who shared a common identity of anti-imperialists, a common cause to die for their land and a political consciousness of Mugabe as the father – and you only have one father in life. Mugabe constructed a whole culture into which his dictatorship found roots.
Of course, the Zimbabwe conflict was nothing of a clash of deeply divided sentiments as was in Kenya or Rwanda. It was just one massive brutal force of government machinery let loose upon the powerless who decided that Mugabe had done his part, and that he had to go democratically. That is why Zimbabwe did not have a people-against-people type of clashes. That is also why Zimbabwe should be easier to heal. The people share much more in common than in division. And my Zimbabwe will heal.
Times of the struggle came and went with confusion of leadership at times. And the songs went “Vaparidzi vawanda / Hatichavizi wekutevera / Honai Baba tadzungaira” to mean “There are too many preachers in Zimbabwe / We no longer know which one to listen to. / Lord, we are thoroughly confused.” After the victory and the war was done, The Green Arrows sang, “Mr. Mugabe is now in control, / Now we know who to follow. / Behold Lord, we have been liberated.”
These Chimurnga Songs planted something deep into the hearts of the people with the all excitement of liberation what their eyes had seen of colonial oppression. As Malawians proverbially put it, “What gets into the ears spreads a mat in the heart” (Kadalowa mkhutu kadayala mphatsa) and “What the eye has seen the heart cannot forsake” (Chaona maso mtima suiwala). They saw the oppression and heard the songs.
That is the power of Chimurenga Songs, and the power of popular culture in planting political ideology. It plants what generations cannot easily dislodge. And Comrade Robert Mugabe’s legacy of survival cannot go without what happened to the hearts of Zimbabweans in the secret rooms of their souls from the Chimurenga War of liberation across their calm and stormy waters of the times that followed.
Mugabe seems to have discovered a secret which African leaders are yet to fully see, the power of using culture to govern hearts of a nation. This is what Terry Eagleton speaks of in his book called The Idea of Culture. “To govern successfully, [we] must therefore understand men and women in their secret desires and aversions, not just in their voting habits and social aspirations. If [we are] to regulate them from inside, it must also imagine them from inside”.
Gathering loyalty and votes goes beyond studying “voting habits” and gauging what the electorates aspire for. This is the Malawi Congress Party has remained a significantly solid party at the seams despite being led by people with neither repute, charisma nor vision as Gwanda Chakwamba and John Tembo have been. The party was made a political norm among the Chewa admirable for our Gule Wamkulu secret society culture that rallies a common sense of identity now being whipped into political identity.
This is what culture can do, writes Eagleton. British Colonisation used culture to conquer our spirit. They used literature in the schools and language (these mirrors and vehicles of culture) to make Africans feel that European life was the norm and our African way of living was abnormal. Norms are necessarily cultural. And their legacy now made part of our norms today stubbornly refuses to go.
Mugabe used the spirit of popular culture to make himself popular with those that shared a common heart of Chimurenga struggle against Western exploitation of gold, diamonds and land. Common sense now says the richer an African country is in minerals, the more it will be a site of conflict – often involving the hand of invisible forces beyond Africa.
And Mugabe appealed to the sympathy of the region by invoking that which had spread a mat in the hearts of African leaders, something deep in our history, something deeper than the bottom of the soul – the sensitivity of land and Western exploitation.
Now, it is over. Mugabe has pledged to share power with Morgan Tsvangirai and Professor Arthur Mutambara. Signing the deal is one thing, a political milestone in the smiles of Africa, implementing is yet another.
The Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) spoke with furious silence, very loud silence. For all his political prowess, even Nelson Mandela could only speak eight words, “The Zimbabwe situation is a crisis of leadership” – well, perhaps only five calculated words: a crisis of leadership! Mandela only described the situation, and never condemned Mugabe.
Malawi’s President Bingu wa Mutharika took to the pulpit and told the world that “the Zimbabwe situation is an African problem, and it must solved by Africans.” Now every African leader who spoke at the power-sharing ceremony said the same one thing. This was an African collective stand, a loud political statements made by a community coming of age.
There is something historically African about Zimbabwe which is a shared problem of the region. Land is a sensitive spot wherever you go in Africa, and the West should have known, besides our minerals being depleted beneath that land. Britain had betrayed Mugabe from the Lancaster House agreement to resolve land problems amicably. The West had failed Zimbabweans.
When Mugabe took desperate and defiant measures by kicking out White farmers unceremoniously, he became a daemon in the eyes of the West. The economy collapsed, most likely because Mugabe had provoked sentiments of those who control multinational economy and trade at our stage of globalization where every economy is significantly determined by global network economic forces. Western media told us the economy is collapsing because farming is affected with the eviction, and this was true, but half of the whole truth.
The silence of the SADC region made four statements to the West. One, we do not want another mayhem and Iraqi in Zimbabwe. We shall not solve Zimbabwe the American way. A war in Zimbabwe would mean a chaos that would dive in to the control their precious minerals too. Malawi’s and Zambia’s economies would suffer as we trade with South Africa via Zimbabwe, and the economic cancer would easily spread. Two, you let our brother down and now you cannot spring back like holy saviours. Three, we Africans are capable of being in charge of our affairs – not that we can completely do away with the West (just as they cannot fully do without us) but that we must be in charge of our destiny. Four, every funeral has its mourners. Zimbabwe was our funeral, and we had to mourn it the African cultural way. After all, politics exists within cultures -- and culture can be the language of politics.
But where did Mugabe go wrong? He unleashed state machinery to suffer his own people, already suffering the yoke of economic dearth. This is why no human sanity can forgive of Mugabe. His internal politics was at best unacceptable, brutally inhuman and what no African leader should dare again.
While some may argue that the power deal in Zimbabwe is rewarding those who lose votes in a democracy, let it be remembered that it remains an exit strategy for Mugabe. After sharing power with Tsvangirai, Mugabe will not be there for the next elections. Besides, it is only politically practical and humane to avert more suffering, bloodbaths and deaths of the many by pretending to appease the daemons that wreak death and havoc, at least as strategy of sending them to rest forever.
But certainly, there is a sense in which the British government ought to have suffered shame and defeat because they wanted to see Mugabe unmasked naked of all human dignity.
But in their suffering and dying, never take away their human dignity. Never. Dignity is the last thing of man to go with. And let Comrade Mugabe go with his dignity, after all his sins. Let the dying go with their human dignity.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
SEARCHING THE HEART OF AFRICA
Great truths begin as blasphemy. So too blasphemous then to say, if you cannot believe in the story of your heartbeat -- that you live, why should vultures hovering about for their survival believe in you? There are many who do not still believe that Malawi, that Africa is capable of rising. It is the story of Africa.
And the story of Africa is beautiful. Well, “Everything is beautiful, but not everyone sees it,” said the Chinese great teacher, Confucius and that was 479 years long before Christ the greatest teacher. That time, China was already a great a story before America and Europe.
All eyes at China now, and the word China literally almost “the centre of the world” and the ancient Chinese believed themselves to the “centre of civilization.” This was the heart of their faith – believing that the engine of social transformation was within their own heart. Not elsewhere, not far away in Europe or America. The Chinese had to discover themselves first. Now China has blossomed like a giant yellow flower unto the world.
Yet, much of Africa is made to believe that our development comes from the West. We almost think everything of the West is beautiful and everything that is “us” must be Westernised. Development and modernisation are “endogenous” – evolving from within and Europe herself transformed from within. This is what Alain Touraine, speaking on behalf of UNESCO, said in 1988. Why should Africa search herself elsewhere rather than within herself?
Aid will not develop Africa. We will develop Africa. Donors will not develop Malawi. We the people will develop our beloved country. And we will build Malawi with our hands. Some South Africans think we are the trash of their society because we have not stayed home to build our country.
Many intellectuals, those who should have taught us otherwise, think South Africa, the Tswana land and the land of the Swazi are the heavens of Africa. So they flee their beautiful motherland in search of greener pastures. Yet, we had no choice but to be born Malawian and we have no choice but to serve our country. That is why the Members of Parliament who play hide and seek with the lives of Malawians sound accursed every time they invoke disorder in the house of laws.
Politicians alone will not develop Malawi, but we together can develop the country. Having served at the highest in European politics as French President, General Charles de Gaulle knew better when he said, "Politics is too serious a game to be left to politicians." Political leaders will not tell our story. We owe our existence to noone but ourselves, and rising with a story of hope is our collective and sacred call. We cannot afford to keep calling Africa The Wretched of the Earth because our children will believe that they are so wretched that they cannot develop.
Yet, there are many prophets of doom and scribes who get thrilled with telling the darker side of our story. The more we do that, the more our children lose hope in our generation. The more we think we cannot develop, the more we cannot develop indeed. Such is the power of thought. Humans are made of their thoughts, and this is what the wonderful writer of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie says.
Yes, I never agreed with Stanley Kenani when his column once outlined the many reasons “Why Africans Cannot Develop”. His crime is that he had dared imply that we cannot develop, and all he sought us to know was “why”. I said, the only reason why we are not developing is because we think we cannot develop.
Surely, the story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his story-teller. The rise of the British Empire began with their own story, which favoured them. They went around convincing us that they are the best of humanity. They elevated themselves first, and the prestige of English tells the story. Unlike all other languages, “they [the English] always write their first pronoun I with a capital letter,” says Robert Southey in Letters from England.
Then came a time when the Americans told us they have the biggest everything in the world. Freedom, wealth and fame were advertised as the heart of the American dream but that had to be won by thrift and hard work. They lived hardworking as a culture and they believed in it like all those who have risen to the heights social progress.
It is blasphemy to think of Blacks as incapable of hard work because God never created a single lazy race in his image. It was incredible hard work for Egyptians to build the pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Giza alone has more than 2.3 million stones weighing 2.5 tons each on average, yet moved across miles of desert and placed with extreme precision until this “First Wonder of the World” towers 138m high. Cheikh Anta Diop writes that Civilisation of Ancient Egypt that invented writing (which Greeks and Romans only refined into the alphabet you are reading now), geometry, architecture, the calendar and was made of Black people and not those Arabs who occupied it thousands of years later.
The roots of European and American civilisations came from these intelligent Black people via the Greeks who copied much from Egypt. But because the story of the world is told by the West, the proverb of the Akan people has become true. The story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his own story-teller. A story is tasted by the tongue of he who tells it. That is what we must tell our story, the story of Malawi.
The story of Africa has mostly been a Euro-American story about us. Before the first European stepped his foot on Africa, so they say, this Africa had no history. Hugh Trevor-Roper is arrogantly blunt, “there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness”.
They saw darkness, not because it was dark, but they saw darkness anyway. Remember Confucius – “Everything is beautiful, but not everyone sees it.” Joseph Conrad simply concluded that Africa was a Heart of Darkness and proceeded to write a novel in that name. The rest of us were invisible.
But the story of the Invisible Man written by Ralph Ellison speaks of wisdom otherwise. The indivisible story-teller of this novel begins, “I am an invisible man…simply because people refuse to see me…That invisibility…occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes with whom I come in contact. [It is a] matter of construction of their inner eyes.”
Therefore seen Under Western Eyes – a story told by George Orwell, what could be seen in Africa was the jungle and some creatures that resembled humans. Today, the story of Heart of Darkness is repeated with fanfare and without shame. When most Europeans and Americans think of touring Africa, they come for the safari, to see the jungle and the animals. The humans of Africa are almost invisible – and the way tourism advertises Africa repeats the story of Africa as a Heart of Darkness because we highlight the beauty of the animals and jungles more than the story of the people and our abilities to civilise more.
While Europe was going through its Dark Ages, Africa was going through unprecedented civilization of beautiful and well organised cities, trading with China, India and Persia between 1000 AD and 1400 AD. China could exchange even diplomats with the rulers on the coast of Tanzania.
Yet, one man ignorantly says “Africa is an ahistoric continent [without history that is]…The people live in a condition of mindlessness and barbering without laws and morality.” His name was Friedrich Hegel, followed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who said “The black people are incapable of thinking in any reflexive manner”. Both of these are drunk by our university students as great thinkers, philosophers who failed to reason objectively about Africa.
We may laugh when the animals in a story called Animal Farm form a society based on one belief – “All animals are equal” only to change their own constitution to read “All animals are equal, but some more equal than others”. Well, there have been times when some Malawians were more equal than others.
But it is no laughing matter when the entire US President declares that “All men are created equal” only to contradict himself by announcing that “It would be impossible for a black person to understand the mathematical formula.” This was Thomas Jefferson, who has gone in memory as a man with “lifelong passion to liberate the human mind from tyranny, whether imposed … [of] our own ignorance.”
Yes, ignorance! How was Thomas Jefferson to know that there was a university in Timbuktu that with 25, 000 students by the 14th Century? This was before the West colonised us. And this is a lost story our school history books do not tell with any patriotic zest. Indeed, what is called “World History” in secondary school is nothing but European history. Colonialism robed us of our history.
But there are some who know better. Only recently, a delegation of European church leaders visited Africa and knelt down before former president of Mozambique and said, “We repent for robbing Africans of their history and identity.”
When President Bingu wa Mutharika one day after a trip to Kigali emphasised that we must be the first to tell our story, it is the restoration of our dignity and identity that he speaks of. No African country can meaningfully develop without deepening its sense of identity, history, dignity and destiny.
European history is full of lies. Europe was not the first to discover that the earth goes round the sun. African mathematicians in the 15th Century knew about “the rotation of the planets, knew about details of the eclipse” almost 200 years before the European Galileo and Corpernicus were to arrive at the same mathematical calculations. Probably, Europeans had not started of thinking of it as a possibility at all. Well, Galileo was almost hanged for his “sins” of discovery by the Catholic Church, then.
When Achebe sets out to tell the story of Africa in Things Fall Apart, he is doing exactly what Mutharika is asking Malawians to do. That novel is our true cultural representation that opposes the story of Europe about us. The culture of Things Fall Apart has its serious weaknesses and questions without easy answers.
Yet, those people in that novel value the sanctity of human life so that even a kinsman who commits suicide as Okonkwo does becomes a thing most loathed. They do fight what they call “the war of blame”, fighting for the sake of it – contrary to the thought that Africans were blood-thirst warmongers before colonialism. They love and value peace for they can dedicate an entire Week of Peace for this reason. When Okonkwo breaks this value and beats his own wife, he is punished for it.
Above all, Africans have been a people of every measure of human dignity, says Achebe in Things Fall Apart. These people did not hear of a civilised culture with the coming of the White man, they were not mindless – adds Achebe elsewhere but they had “flourishing industries – civilised to the marrow” as Robin Walker writes in his When We Ruled. As late as 1400, the people of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique and Malawi were trading with Far East, and as far as China. We could brave and sail the high and far seas.
Indeed, “Without the help an anonymous East African sailor,” reports Stephen Williams, “it is doubtful that Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, would have succeeded in ‘discovering’ India.” We knew India before the earliest of their explorers claimed to have discovered it. Even when the Portuguese Francisco Alvarez came to Ethiopia to convert them to Christianity in the 1520s, he found only found the Ethiopian city of Lalibela which already had 11 underground Christian churches. There was nobody to convert to Roman Catholicism, and wondering whether the doubting Thomas of Portugal would believe it, this missionary wrote: “I swear by God, in whose power I am, that all that is written is the truth.”
Our cultures are not primitive or backward as we have been made to believe by the West. They only have their own internal weaknesses. But that is like any other culture. Even Western culture is confronted with serious moral questions. How can you call human beings who love to watch two bullies tearing each others flesh and bleeding in the name of Boxing a game of the civilised? While they come to teach my old mother about human rights and gendered rights, the woman is the most commodified and undignified humanity in the capitalist society of the West. Women are for advertising, even if it means undressing them for money! The list is endless.
Perhaps not much changed then. Instead of seeing darkness, they still see the bush first before they see human beings. They see the safari, the game. When I asked an American and a British history professors in England only this last September, “What do the British and American travellers desire to see first in Africa?” – these colleagues frankly and concurrently said, “the safari”. The animals first!
The way we advertise tourism both within Africa and Euro-America only promotes this image. We must invent construct our own Seven Wonders of Malawi which they must come to see – not just game. The image of game or safari still portrays us as the people of the bush where modern civilisation is remote from imagination.
Why should the Western tourist be invited to see the monkey more than the civilised wonders of our hands?
In order to “discover Africa…up and personal”, one tourist advert says, we must see the monkey captured in the heart of darkness. The designer had to ensure that the Chimpanzee symbolising Africa in the advert must be surrounded by an impervious thick black image – an image of darkness those who said Africa has no history talked about. Disturbing memories of the Western story that the African is close to the ape in his evolution, when you remember Charles Darwin’s impotent theory that Man evolved from the monkey, becomes inevitable in this advertisement of Africa. When some think of an African to be seen, then it is the nomadic Masai and some such tribes.
But now the story is changing. If they will not come to see the safari and the nomadic Masai whose culture is fine while they see him as part of game, they come to see poverty. They come to see The Wretched of the Earth! Yet, Africans can afford to share a beautiful smile in their material poverty, even to people we do not know.
The story of the richness of Africa remains untold. Noone tells us that the only mineral rock to have existed on the soils of Britain is a little coal – malasha. Much of the rest came from Africa. But nobody tells us the story of the poverty of England.
Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim is the founder of Celtel but he was born in Sudan. He is not Western, not White but very successful. When he says, “We have shown that Africa is continent where you can conduct business successfully,” we are tried and found wanting – convicted because we often of investors as people who must come out of Africa. We want developed and big companies that come to Africa on a silver platter rather growing ours from a scratch. Look at Celtel today, with over 17 million subscribers in 15 countries! The riches are here, we are only trying to be mentally poor.
One of the richest men who ever lived on record but in the 14th Century was an African, generous, pious, dressed in Persian silk and his name was Mansa Musa of Mali. He once travelled with 60, 000 men on a pilgrimage to Mecca, including 12, 000 slaves – 500 of whom directly preceding him with “a staff of gold” each while he stately rode on a horseback.
Mansa Musa spent so much money in gold while in Egypt that the national economy collapsed after he left. “For years after Mansa Mussa’s visit,” writes Professor DeGraft Johnson, “ordinary people in the streets of Cairo, Mecca, and Baghdad talked about this wonderful pilgrimage – a pilgrimage which led to the devaluation of gold in the Middle East for several years.”
Africa has walked her wonderful pilgrimage to prosperity before the West invaded and destroyed our memory. These are wonderful memories we must tell – wondering: what type of history do we teach our children?
Malawi has a wonderful story to tell the world too. Yet, some choose to post the darker side of our wonderfully beautiful face while our little children to ask you and me: who robbed us of our beautiful history, identity, pride and sense of self-worth? What shall we say to the generation of our children, then?
A story is a trail of the blaze that tears apart darkness into blazing hope. The path to destiny is not possible without hope. But the story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his own story-teller. Africa, tell me a story of hope.
And the story of Africa is beautiful. Well, “Everything is beautiful, but not everyone sees it,” said the Chinese great teacher, Confucius and that was 479 years long before Christ the greatest teacher. That time, China was already a great a story before America and Europe.
All eyes at China now, and the word China literally almost “the centre of the world” and the ancient Chinese believed themselves to the “centre of civilization.” This was the heart of their faith – believing that the engine of social transformation was within their own heart. Not elsewhere, not far away in Europe or America. The Chinese had to discover themselves first. Now China has blossomed like a giant yellow flower unto the world.
Yet, much of Africa is made to believe that our development comes from the West. We almost think everything of the West is beautiful and everything that is “us” must be Westernised. Development and modernisation are “endogenous” – evolving from within and Europe herself transformed from within. This is what Alain Touraine, speaking on behalf of UNESCO, said in 1988. Why should Africa search herself elsewhere rather than within herself?
Aid will not develop Africa. We will develop Africa. Donors will not develop Malawi. We the people will develop our beloved country. And we will build Malawi with our hands. Some South Africans think we are the trash of their society because we have not stayed home to build our country.
Many intellectuals, those who should have taught us otherwise, think South Africa, the Tswana land and the land of the Swazi are the heavens of Africa. So they flee their beautiful motherland in search of greener pastures. Yet, we had no choice but to be born Malawian and we have no choice but to serve our country. That is why the Members of Parliament who play hide and seek with the lives of Malawians sound accursed every time they invoke disorder in the house of laws.
Politicians alone will not develop Malawi, but we together can develop the country. Having served at the highest in European politics as French President, General Charles de Gaulle knew better when he said, "Politics is too serious a game to be left to politicians." Political leaders will not tell our story. We owe our existence to noone but ourselves, and rising with a story of hope is our collective and sacred call. We cannot afford to keep calling Africa The Wretched of the Earth because our children will believe that they are so wretched that they cannot develop.
Yet, there are many prophets of doom and scribes who get thrilled with telling the darker side of our story. The more we do that, the more our children lose hope in our generation. The more we think we cannot develop, the more we cannot develop indeed. Such is the power of thought. Humans are made of their thoughts, and this is what the wonderful writer of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie says.
Yes, I never agreed with Stanley Kenani when his column once outlined the many reasons “Why Africans Cannot Develop”. His crime is that he had dared imply that we cannot develop, and all he sought us to know was “why”. I said, the only reason why we are not developing is because we think we cannot develop.
Surely, the story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his story-teller. The rise of the British Empire began with their own story, which favoured them. They went around convincing us that they are the best of humanity. They elevated themselves first, and the prestige of English tells the story. Unlike all other languages, “they [the English] always write their first pronoun I with a capital letter,” says Robert Southey in Letters from England.
Then came a time when the Americans told us they have the biggest everything in the world. Freedom, wealth and fame were advertised as the heart of the American dream but that had to be won by thrift and hard work. They lived hardworking as a culture and they believed in it like all those who have risen to the heights social progress.
It is blasphemy to think of Blacks as incapable of hard work because God never created a single lazy race in his image. It was incredible hard work for Egyptians to build the pyramids. The Great Pyramid of Giza alone has more than 2.3 million stones weighing 2.5 tons each on average, yet moved across miles of desert and placed with extreme precision until this “First Wonder of the World” towers 138m high. Cheikh Anta Diop writes that Civilisation of Ancient Egypt that invented writing (which Greeks and Romans only refined into the alphabet you are reading now), geometry, architecture, the calendar and was made of Black people and not those Arabs who occupied it thousands of years later.
The roots of European and American civilisations came from these intelligent Black people via the Greeks who copied much from Egypt. But because the story of the world is told by the West, the proverb of the Akan people has become true. The story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his own story-teller. A story is tasted by the tongue of he who tells it. That is what we must tell our story, the story of Malawi.
The story of Africa has mostly been a Euro-American story about us. Before the first European stepped his foot on Africa, so they say, this Africa had no history. Hugh Trevor-Roper is arrogantly blunt, “there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness”.
They saw darkness, not because it was dark, but they saw darkness anyway. Remember Confucius – “Everything is beautiful, but not everyone sees it.” Joseph Conrad simply concluded that Africa was a Heart of Darkness and proceeded to write a novel in that name. The rest of us were invisible.
But the story of the Invisible Man written by Ralph Ellison speaks of wisdom otherwise. The indivisible story-teller of this novel begins, “I am an invisible man…simply because people refuse to see me…That invisibility…occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes with whom I come in contact. [It is a] matter of construction of their inner eyes.”
Therefore seen Under Western Eyes – a story told by George Orwell, what could be seen in Africa was the jungle and some creatures that resembled humans. Today, the story of Heart of Darkness is repeated with fanfare and without shame. When most Europeans and Americans think of touring Africa, they come for the safari, to see the jungle and the animals. The humans of Africa are almost invisible – and the way tourism advertises Africa repeats the story of Africa as a Heart of Darkness because we highlight the beauty of the animals and jungles more than the story of the people and our abilities to civilise more.
While Europe was going through its Dark Ages, Africa was going through unprecedented civilization of beautiful and well organised cities, trading with China, India and Persia between 1000 AD and 1400 AD. China could exchange even diplomats with the rulers on the coast of Tanzania.
Yet, one man ignorantly says “Africa is an ahistoric continent [without history that is]…The people live in a condition of mindlessness and barbering without laws and morality.” His name was Friedrich Hegel, followed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who said “The black people are incapable of thinking in any reflexive manner”. Both of these are drunk by our university students as great thinkers, philosophers who failed to reason objectively about Africa.
We may laugh when the animals in a story called Animal Farm form a society based on one belief – “All animals are equal” only to change their own constitution to read “All animals are equal, but some more equal than others”. Well, there have been times when some Malawians were more equal than others.
But it is no laughing matter when the entire US President declares that “All men are created equal” only to contradict himself by announcing that “It would be impossible for a black person to understand the mathematical formula.” This was Thomas Jefferson, who has gone in memory as a man with “lifelong passion to liberate the human mind from tyranny, whether imposed … [of] our own ignorance.”
Yes, ignorance! How was Thomas Jefferson to know that there was a university in Timbuktu that with 25, 000 students by the 14th Century? This was before the West colonised us. And this is a lost story our school history books do not tell with any patriotic zest. Indeed, what is called “World History” in secondary school is nothing but European history. Colonialism robed us of our history.
But there are some who know better. Only recently, a delegation of European church leaders visited Africa and knelt down before former president of Mozambique and said, “We repent for robbing Africans of their history and identity.”
When President Bingu wa Mutharika one day after a trip to Kigali emphasised that we must be the first to tell our story, it is the restoration of our dignity and identity that he speaks of. No African country can meaningfully develop without deepening its sense of identity, history, dignity and destiny.
European history is full of lies. Europe was not the first to discover that the earth goes round the sun. African mathematicians in the 15th Century knew about “the rotation of the planets, knew about details of the eclipse” almost 200 years before the European Galileo and Corpernicus were to arrive at the same mathematical calculations. Probably, Europeans had not started of thinking of it as a possibility at all. Well, Galileo was almost hanged for his “sins” of discovery by the Catholic Church, then.
When Achebe sets out to tell the story of Africa in Things Fall Apart, he is doing exactly what Mutharika is asking Malawians to do. That novel is our true cultural representation that opposes the story of Europe about us. The culture of Things Fall Apart has its serious weaknesses and questions without easy answers.
Yet, those people in that novel value the sanctity of human life so that even a kinsman who commits suicide as Okonkwo does becomes a thing most loathed. They do fight what they call “the war of blame”, fighting for the sake of it – contrary to the thought that Africans were blood-thirst warmongers before colonialism. They love and value peace for they can dedicate an entire Week of Peace for this reason. When Okonkwo breaks this value and beats his own wife, he is punished for it.
Above all, Africans have been a people of every measure of human dignity, says Achebe in Things Fall Apart. These people did not hear of a civilised culture with the coming of the White man, they were not mindless – adds Achebe elsewhere but they had “flourishing industries – civilised to the marrow” as Robin Walker writes in his When We Ruled. As late as 1400, the people of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique and Malawi were trading with Far East, and as far as China. We could brave and sail the high and far seas.
Indeed, “Without the help an anonymous East African sailor,” reports Stephen Williams, “it is doubtful that Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, would have succeeded in ‘discovering’ India.” We knew India before the earliest of their explorers claimed to have discovered it. Even when the Portuguese Francisco Alvarez came to Ethiopia to convert them to Christianity in the 1520s, he found only found the Ethiopian city of Lalibela which already had 11 underground Christian churches. There was nobody to convert to Roman Catholicism, and wondering whether the doubting Thomas of Portugal would believe it, this missionary wrote: “I swear by God, in whose power I am, that all that is written is the truth.”
Our cultures are not primitive or backward as we have been made to believe by the West. They only have their own internal weaknesses. But that is like any other culture. Even Western culture is confronted with serious moral questions. How can you call human beings who love to watch two bullies tearing each others flesh and bleeding in the name of Boxing a game of the civilised? While they come to teach my old mother about human rights and gendered rights, the woman is the most commodified and undignified humanity in the capitalist society of the West. Women are for advertising, even if it means undressing them for money! The list is endless.
Perhaps not much changed then. Instead of seeing darkness, they still see the bush first before they see human beings. They see the safari, the game. When I asked an American and a British history professors in England only this last September, “What do the British and American travellers desire to see first in Africa?” – these colleagues frankly and concurrently said, “the safari”. The animals first!
The way we advertise tourism both within Africa and Euro-America only promotes this image. We must invent construct our own Seven Wonders of Malawi which they must come to see – not just game. The image of game or safari still portrays us as the people of the bush where modern civilisation is remote from imagination.
Why should the Western tourist be invited to see the monkey more than the civilised wonders of our hands?
In order to “discover Africa…up and personal”, one tourist advert says, we must see the monkey captured in the heart of darkness. The designer had to ensure that the Chimpanzee symbolising Africa in the advert must be surrounded by an impervious thick black image – an image of darkness those who said Africa has no history talked about. Disturbing memories of the Western story that the African is close to the ape in his evolution, when you remember Charles Darwin’s impotent theory that Man evolved from the monkey, becomes inevitable in this advertisement of Africa. When some think of an African to be seen, then it is the nomadic Masai and some such tribes.
But now the story is changing. If they will not come to see the safari and the nomadic Masai whose culture is fine while they see him as part of game, they come to see poverty. They come to see The Wretched of the Earth! Yet, Africans can afford to share a beautiful smile in their material poverty, even to people we do not know.
The story of the richness of Africa remains untold. Noone tells us that the only mineral rock to have existed on the soils of Britain is a little coal – malasha. Much of the rest came from Africa. But nobody tells us the story of the poverty of England.
Dr. Mohamed Ibrahim is the founder of Celtel but he was born in Sudan. He is not Western, not White but very successful. When he says, “We have shown that Africa is continent where you can conduct business successfully,” we are tried and found wanting – convicted because we often of investors as people who must come out of Africa. We want developed and big companies that come to Africa on a silver platter rather growing ours from a scratch. Look at Celtel today, with over 17 million subscribers in 15 countries! The riches are here, we are only trying to be mentally poor.
One of the richest men who ever lived on record but in the 14th Century was an African, generous, pious, dressed in Persian silk and his name was Mansa Musa of Mali. He once travelled with 60, 000 men on a pilgrimage to Mecca, including 12, 000 slaves – 500 of whom directly preceding him with “a staff of gold” each while he stately rode on a horseback.
Mansa Musa spent so much money in gold while in Egypt that the national economy collapsed after he left. “For years after Mansa Mussa’s visit,” writes Professor DeGraft Johnson, “ordinary people in the streets of Cairo, Mecca, and Baghdad talked about this wonderful pilgrimage – a pilgrimage which led to the devaluation of gold in the Middle East for several years.”
Africa has walked her wonderful pilgrimage to prosperity before the West invaded and destroyed our memory. These are wonderful memories we must tell – wondering: what type of history do we teach our children?
Malawi has a wonderful story to tell the world too. Yet, some choose to post the darker side of our wonderfully beautiful face while our little children to ask you and me: who robbed us of our beautiful history, identity, pride and sense of self-worth? What shall we say to the generation of our children, then?
A story is a trail of the blaze that tears apart darkness into blazing hope. The path to destiny is not possible without hope. But the story of hunting will always favour the hunter until the lion invents his own story-teller. Africa, tell me a story of hope.
I See Africa Africa in Memories of Kamuzu
In our Warm Heart of Africa, Africa’s most colourful but somber-faced flags stand and solemnly guard a hero well fallen in the storm of memories. Honoured and treasured in a tomb more than $600, 000 – a site all that see Africa should see, this Africa’s warrior sleeps in the Capital of Malawi now for ever.
Feared and great in his fighting times, fallen in his end, yet greater in our sober memories; he was one Africa’s rare son, Africa’s fighting and liberating spirit only fallen down in the memories of many as Malawi’s dictator.
Remembered in a storm of mixed feelings, but the wise ones know that memories are the best honour given of the dead. We also know virtues of the dead grow taller than their sins once buried.
Great men remember him well. Even of his tyranny, “We can forgive, but not forget”, says Jack Mapanje, now Malawi’s world-class poet who suffered a share of the worse of Kamuzu Banda’s times. He was complex, yes, and is in Western media described as “part African, part Victorian, part Mussolini, part Monty Python”.
Yet, "Notwithstanding his public image, he was a man who did many things people did not know about." And this is the voice of Nelson Mandela, a great man. "He did something that despite his image was unbelievable," Mandela said. This great fighter remembers Kanuzu as a Pan-African liberator fighter who “ensured that liberation armies had the necessary weapons to conduct their struggle.” What voice can outweigh Mandela?
And our wise ancestors knew it better, long before. They thought and said, “A child will remain dear and precious to the mother no matter how despicable to the public he might be. [Chiipira achaje make nati mwana].” Kamuzu’s government walked us through a storm where some were lost on the way, yes, but perhaps he was greater than we have said – for he was a Statesman of Africa: a true nationalist and liberator.
Great men know it well, and one Africa’s Statesman of our time describes him as “a great intellectual.” President Bingu wa Mutharika remembers well, “He was a man I greatly respected for his vision of Malawi, his wisdom and his statesmanship. I respected him as a great intellectual.”
And yes, we all remember the last of the wisdom of Kamuzu Banda. He accepted change. When the storm of change had begun to drift us into democratic times, Banda advised his followers not to resist inevitable change. How wise! And he bowed out of power honourably even after books had indelibly written that he was “The Life President of Malawi”, in vernacular ‘wamuyaya’ – meaning ‘the Eternal One’. It takes wisdom to accept how finite in nature and power Man is – and he “accepted defeat in an extraordinary show of mutual graciousness” as Bill Keller of The New York Times remembers. This single act of wisdom is now out to laugh with wide-mouthed mockery at the foolhardy of those African leaders who think can stay in power eternally.
Sadly, Banda’s political mistakes cast a hardly thin dark cloud over his virtues. The media world over has not seen the face of Africa in his statesmanship, unfortunately. Otherwise, he was a man whose greatness tiptoes on the heels of Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela once we have learnt to “Forgive but not forget,” and to remember him soberly.
He saw from a sober distance, he came from the clouds, fought and conquered. But he slipped into traps of power, and fell into the rest of those gone before us, gone never to return. A people without memory stagger into the danger of losing their destiny, lest we forget. Kamuzu Banda may be remembered as a dictator, yet a visionary nationalist in whom I see Africa liberated.
The year Kamuzu did not live to see, 2007, marked exactly half a century when Africa first got liberated from colonial claws. It was a year counting the last finger to a decade after his soul slept. This is the year when the gold dust of Ghana’s 50th Anniversary dances stirred with Mother Africa’s memories of her first independence. Now we have walked half a century of a storm questions. How long Africa? Wither Africa?
The destiny of Africa as a continent has always been decided by two counter-opposing forces. The force of exploiters and that of liberators. And Malawi has a place less talked about in the wars of Africa’s liberation. While the much of the continent had not figured out what the parasites of colonialism, Malawi had a John Chilembwe who took guns against the White man as early as 1915.
When the next storm of liberation swept across Africa, and Kwame Nkrumah led the war against colonialism, Kamuzu was there with him – fighting.
Nkrumah led Ghana’s independence from the British on 6 March 1957, and tattooed marks of the beginning of Africa’s political liberation. “But Ghana was more than just the beginning” says Julius Nyerere, for “Ghana inspired and deliberately spearheaded the independence struggle of the rest of Africa.”
This was a war of liberation launched at a grand scale, liberation from Africa’s worst repressive dictators. The colonialists did not just butcher, oppress and exploit us, but despite whatever development, they dehumanized and demonized us more than any other African dictator. Colonialists killed the soul of Africa, killed our dignity and made us look the West as a god of our salvation without which Africa cannot survive.
And since colonialism, says Ghana’s own celebrated novelist, poet and scholar – Ayi Kwei Armah, “the continent has been under a steady, devastating assault … [wreaked by] the work of thieves, murderers, pirates and all sorts of conscienceless adventurers driven by just one bloody god: profit.” He writes in his latest novel, The Eloquence of the Scribes.
When Nkrumah rose to lead the liberation of the land, the dignity and the soul of the butchered, exploited and dehumanized Africans, and Kamuzu was there, in that dust of independence. He was a great friend of Nkrumah’s, and a nationalist who strategically moved from Britain to Ghana in 1953 to practice medicine. Knowing the collective nationalist spirit of the leaders then, Kamuzu must have certainly been part of Ghana’s war for liberation. He was there.
Kamuzu and Nkrumah came a long way. They were there at the Pan-African Congress meeting of intellectuals of 1945 in Manchester. This “gave great impetus to the movement for African independence and fostered African leadership of the Pan-African movement.” They were there, sharing the fire, the vision and the Great Dream to free Africa.
Like a flower blossoming at a bright dawn, the Great Dream flourished into reality on Ghana’s sunrise. But Kamuzu did not wait to bask and enjoy in the Africa’s great sunrise for he had a good fight to fight. “The country’s independence inspired him to pack his bags and go to Malawi to join the independence struggle,” writes Dr. Kenneth Kaunda.
In 1958, Kamuzu arrived from the clouds at Chileka Airport against the storm of resistance mounted by the colonial exploiters and butchers who came to civilize us.
But Kamuzu Banda brought five things from Ghana. First was the great dream of Africa’s liberation. Then came the fighting spirit. Kamuzu brought a shared vision to develop the liberated country too. He shared Nkrumah’s political system. But perhaps the saddest thing Kamuzu brought home was fear – it is this that began to make Kamuzu a dictator.
Nkrumah’s vision of liberation was for the whole Africa. This great son of Africa, whom Namibia’s Sam Nujoma describes as “the epitome of pan-Africanism” who “moved mountains” of hope and walked shadowy “valleys of death in order to selflessly achieve freedom and independence for the people of Africa.” He wanted Ghana developed and Africa united because the independence of one country “is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.”
Kamuzu-Banda did not selfishly just come to liberate Nyasaland only, now Malawi. He came to free Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe which then formed the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. “I have come to break the stupid federation,” he said and he did just that. He launched the process of liberating the Zambians and Zimbabweans too. And Kenneth Kaunda saw it all, and honoured Kamuzu with a Doctor of Letters as the Destroyer of the Federation.
Even after liberating Malawi, one more thing haunted Kamuzu’s Ghana dreams. Zimbabwe’s liberation war was long drawn and bloody. Kamuzu fought with Zimbabweans in the Chimurenga Wars. He financed resistant guerrilla groups of Zimbabwe.
It is said he fought on the side of RENAMO in Mozambique, which for him was a war against Communism. Kamuzu was not a man could stand an ideology he despised right in his neighbourhood. He was a fighter who thought in regional spheres!
But Africa’s war of liberation from colonialism has been long drawn across time and space, running over 37 years from the first independence to the last one – from Ghana to South Africa. The gracious memories of Julius Nyerere take us across, “In 1994, we celebrated our final triumph when apartheid was crushed and Nelson Mandela was installed as the president of South Africa.”
Kamuzu was there in the beginning of independence, and in the end too. He was part of the last of the victories against colonialism in South Africa. Malawi financially assisted Nelson Mandela in an under-cover-of-darkness war against the Apartheid regime he befriended during day.
But indeed, both D.D. Phiri (the walking archives) and Mzati Nkolokosa the erudite journalist agree that “Kamuzu was very shrewd in his foreign policy.” He fooled the Apartheid regime.
Kamuzu openly defied the international community and feasted at the same table with the South African Apartheid regime. But he turned round supported Mandela in his fight against the same Apartheid system – for the sake of the liberation of Blacks.
Perhaps the longest lasting memories are the smiles of Mandela after the last of the wars against colonial oppression and dehumanisation. "He did something that despite his image was unbelievable," testifies Mandela, and “he ensured that liberation armies had the necessary weapons to conduct their struggle”. This Great Mandela recalls that when he came to Blantyre after his release to ask for financial assistance for the African National Congress, Kamuzu Banda had "responded magnificently" and sent large sums of money despite his open links with Apartheid.
This is the Kamuzu Banda who befriended Whites at every official level, even loved part of Western lifestyles to merit the portrayal of “an eccentric leader in three-piece suit and homburg”. Yet, he did not smile at much of the nonsense of the Whites. He fought the British and remained a great friend of the Queen of England.
If Nkrumah started the liberation, and Mandela concluded it, Kamuzu was actively all there despite invisibly like the spirit of the age. But the Nkrumah whom Sam Nujoma agrees to have been “the Indomitable Lion of Africa” was a great leader. And in President Bingu wa Mutharika’s words, “It was Kamuzu’s rare leadership quality that led to Egyptian president Abdel Nasser to name him “Lion of Africa”.
Yet these great men were haunted by fear of the forces of ill-will. Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party as a result formed a military wing parallel to the state machinery. Our roaring Lion pounced and dragged home that too by forming Malawi Young Pioneers, a well trained and disciplined but ruthless military wing beside the red-shirted notoriously hardnosed Youth League.
Nkrumah was haunted by six attempts at his life. Once, a grenade was thrown into his convoy and Kamuzu must have been awakened by the life-begging cries of fractured souls, and the crimson carnage from which his friend survived.
Finally, Nkrumah was toppled in a coup while in flight on a peace mission to Vietnam where America was at war. Africa was shot in mid-flight on that day of a darkening sky, 24 February 1966. Africa stepped into a season of coups and civil wars for the years that followed.
Yet the American leadership must have been rejoicing. Recently declassified files now testify that the CIA had engineered the mid-flight coup with a smiling blessing from the British as Nkrumah was flying too high for the world. But the plot was delivered by local collaborators of Ghana, Nkrumah’s own brothers.
The shrewd and complex Kamuzu Banda clearly developed fears and became too suspicious of his own brothers. How could he tell whether they were not local collaborators? Kamuzu would fight anyone suspected of plotting to shoot down Malawi’s flight to a greater destiny, for Kamuzu paradoxically had the vision and welfare of the people. The fear of a mid-flight coup of his agenda must have made Kamuzu a dictator.
Malawians walked their dignity in his days. One international journalist remembers, “No matter how menial their occupation, Malawians have never thought of themselves as slaves. They were sages, unfazed by the arrogance of their wealthier neighbours.”
That season of the self-worth and the dignity of a people was eroded with the Bakili Muluzi flood of change when the national leader himself public bragged of being an international beggar.
As we remember Malawi’s Kamuzu Banda and international place in political liberation, it has become impossible now to see President Bingu wa Mutharika’s international place in Africa’s economic liberation. After years of talking about SADC and COMESA regional blocs whose land was hardly connected, Bingu has brought the Shire-Zambezi Water way that opens up countries that thought are landlocked, as countries in the region physically open to each other more than ever.
Bingu stood in Paris and told Europe to perceive and support Africa become “an economic partner in development” who should be supported to generate its capital rather than support Africa to play the beggar for ever. And this was a new African visionary of Africa speaking to the world. When Bingu fearlessly told the world at the United Nations to stop playing the hypocrite and accept the Republic of China into the fold of the world – and Malawi went into diplomatic ties with the RoC in the eyes of Mainland China, it was a vision of a new world coming from Malawi.
In seeing Bingu, I we remember Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda the international Statesman. So, the female Chewa Senior Chief whose tongue slipped into calling Bingu our “Ngwazi” (meaning fighter, liberator) must have wisely seen Africa rising with Bingu to the heights Kamuzu reached for before he fell into washed memories of a dictator.
Soon, the world is seeing through the eyes Bingu’s global an economic liberator and beacon of Africa who confesses, admires and walks the towering stature of Kamuzu the political liberator. Even Great Mandela Mandela warmly testifies Malawi’s “unbelievable” liberation wars fought in the storms of controversy.
For whatever his story, Kamuzu has a place in the Heart of Africa, in the storm of memories that blow away tears of seasons gone.
Feared and great in his fighting times, fallen in his end, yet greater in our sober memories; he was one Africa’s rare son, Africa’s fighting and liberating spirit only fallen down in the memories of many as Malawi’s dictator.
Remembered in a storm of mixed feelings, but the wise ones know that memories are the best honour given of the dead. We also know virtues of the dead grow taller than their sins once buried.
Great men remember him well. Even of his tyranny, “We can forgive, but not forget”, says Jack Mapanje, now Malawi’s world-class poet who suffered a share of the worse of Kamuzu Banda’s times. He was complex, yes, and is in Western media described as “part African, part Victorian, part Mussolini, part Monty Python”.
Yet, "Notwithstanding his public image, he was a man who did many things people did not know about." And this is the voice of Nelson Mandela, a great man. "He did something that despite his image was unbelievable," Mandela said. This great fighter remembers Kanuzu as a Pan-African liberator fighter who “ensured that liberation armies had the necessary weapons to conduct their struggle.” What voice can outweigh Mandela?
And our wise ancestors knew it better, long before. They thought and said, “A child will remain dear and precious to the mother no matter how despicable to the public he might be. [Chiipira achaje make nati mwana].” Kamuzu’s government walked us through a storm where some were lost on the way, yes, but perhaps he was greater than we have said – for he was a Statesman of Africa: a true nationalist and liberator.
Great men know it well, and one Africa’s Statesman of our time describes him as “a great intellectual.” President Bingu wa Mutharika remembers well, “He was a man I greatly respected for his vision of Malawi, his wisdom and his statesmanship. I respected him as a great intellectual.”
And yes, we all remember the last of the wisdom of Kamuzu Banda. He accepted change. When the storm of change had begun to drift us into democratic times, Banda advised his followers not to resist inevitable change. How wise! And he bowed out of power honourably even after books had indelibly written that he was “The Life President of Malawi”, in vernacular ‘wamuyaya’ – meaning ‘the Eternal One’. It takes wisdom to accept how finite in nature and power Man is – and he “accepted defeat in an extraordinary show of mutual graciousness” as Bill Keller of The New York Times remembers. This single act of wisdom is now out to laugh with wide-mouthed mockery at the foolhardy of those African leaders who think can stay in power eternally.
Sadly, Banda’s political mistakes cast a hardly thin dark cloud over his virtues. The media world over has not seen the face of Africa in his statesmanship, unfortunately. Otherwise, he was a man whose greatness tiptoes on the heels of Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela once we have learnt to “Forgive but not forget,” and to remember him soberly.
He saw from a sober distance, he came from the clouds, fought and conquered. But he slipped into traps of power, and fell into the rest of those gone before us, gone never to return. A people without memory stagger into the danger of losing their destiny, lest we forget. Kamuzu Banda may be remembered as a dictator, yet a visionary nationalist in whom I see Africa liberated.
The year Kamuzu did not live to see, 2007, marked exactly half a century when Africa first got liberated from colonial claws. It was a year counting the last finger to a decade after his soul slept. This is the year when the gold dust of Ghana’s 50th Anniversary dances stirred with Mother Africa’s memories of her first independence. Now we have walked half a century of a storm questions. How long Africa? Wither Africa?
The destiny of Africa as a continent has always been decided by two counter-opposing forces. The force of exploiters and that of liberators. And Malawi has a place less talked about in the wars of Africa’s liberation. While the much of the continent had not figured out what the parasites of colonialism, Malawi had a John Chilembwe who took guns against the White man as early as 1915.
When the next storm of liberation swept across Africa, and Kwame Nkrumah led the war against colonialism, Kamuzu was there with him – fighting.
Nkrumah led Ghana’s independence from the British on 6 March 1957, and tattooed marks of the beginning of Africa’s political liberation. “But Ghana was more than just the beginning” says Julius Nyerere, for “Ghana inspired and deliberately spearheaded the independence struggle of the rest of Africa.”
This was a war of liberation launched at a grand scale, liberation from Africa’s worst repressive dictators. The colonialists did not just butcher, oppress and exploit us, but despite whatever development, they dehumanized and demonized us more than any other African dictator. Colonialists killed the soul of Africa, killed our dignity and made us look the West as a god of our salvation without which Africa cannot survive.
And since colonialism, says Ghana’s own celebrated novelist, poet and scholar – Ayi Kwei Armah, “the continent has been under a steady, devastating assault … [wreaked by] the work of thieves, murderers, pirates and all sorts of conscienceless adventurers driven by just one bloody god: profit.” He writes in his latest novel, The Eloquence of the Scribes.
When Nkrumah rose to lead the liberation of the land, the dignity and the soul of the butchered, exploited and dehumanized Africans, and Kamuzu was there, in that dust of independence. He was a great friend of Nkrumah’s, and a nationalist who strategically moved from Britain to Ghana in 1953 to practice medicine. Knowing the collective nationalist spirit of the leaders then, Kamuzu must have certainly been part of Ghana’s war for liberation. He was there.
Kamuzu and Nkrumah came a long way. They were there at the Pan-African Congress meeting of intellectuals of 1945 in Manchester. This “gave great impetus to the movement for African independence and fostered African leadership of the Pan-African movement.” They were there, sharing the fire, the vision and the Great Dream to free Africa.
Like a flower blossoming at a bright dawn, the Great Dream flourished into reality on Ghana’s sunrise. But Kamuzu did not wait to bask and enjoy in the Africa’s great sunrise for he had a good fight to fight. “The country’s independence inspired him to pack his bags and go to Malawi to join the independence struggle,” writes Dr. Kenneth Kaunda.
In 1958, Kamuzu arrived from the clouds at Chileka Airport against the storm of resistance mounted by the colonial exploiters and butchers who came to civilize us.
But Kamuzu Banda brought five things from Ghana. First was the great dream of Africa’s liberation. Then came the fighting spirit. Kamuzu brought a shared vision to develop the liberated country too. He shared Nkrumah’s political system. But perhaps the saddest thing Kamuzu brought home was fear – it is this that began to make Kamuzu a dictator.
Nkrumah’s vision of liberation was for the whole Africa. This great son of Africa, whom Namibia’s Sam Nujoma describes as “the epitome of pan-Africanism” who “moved mountains” of hope and walked shadowy “valleys of death in order to selflessly achieve freedom and independence for the people of Africa.” He wanted Ghana developed and Africa united because the independence of one country “is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa.”
Kamuzu-Banda did not selfishly just come to liberate Nyasaland only, now Malawi. He came to free Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe which then formed the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. “I have come to break the stupid federation,” he said and he did just that. He launched the process of liberating the Zambians and Zimbabweans too. And Kenneth Kaunda saw it all, and honoured Kamuzu with a Doctor of Letters as the Destroyer of the Federation.
Even after liberating Malawi, one more thing haunted Kamuzu’s Ghana dreams. Zimbabwe’s liberation war was long drawn and bloody. Kamuzu fought with Zimbabweans in the Chimurenga Wars. He financed resistant guerrilla groups of Zimbabwe.
It is said he fought on the side of RENAMO in Mozambique, which for him was a war against Communism. Kamuzu was not a man could stand an ideology he despised right in his neighbourhood. He was a fighter who thought in regional spheres!
But Africa’s war of liberation from colonialism has been long drawn across time and space, running over 37 years from the first independence to the last one – from Ghana to South Africa. The gracious memories of Julius Nyerere take us across, “In 1994, we celebrated our final triumph when apartheid was crushed and Nelson Mandela was installed as the president of South Africa.”
Kamuzu was there in the beginning of independence, and in the end too. He was part of the last of the victories against colonialism in South Africa. Malawi financially assisted Nelson Mandela in an under-cover-of-darkness war against the Apartheid regime he befriended during day.
But indeed, both D.D. Phiri (the walking archives) and Mzati Nkolokosa the erudite journalist agree that “Kamuzu was very shrewd in his foreign policy.” He fooled the Apartheid regime.
Kamuzu openly defied the international community and feasted at the same table with the South African Apartheid regime. But he turned round supported Mandela in his fight against the same Apartheid system – for the sake of the liberation of Blacks.
Perhaps the longest lasting memories are the smiles of Mandela after the last of the wars against colonial oppression and dehumanisation. "He did something that despite his image was unbelievable," testifies Mandela, and “he ensured that liberation armies had the necessary weapons to conduct their struggle”. This Great Mandela recalls that when he came to Blantyre after his release to ask for financial assistance for the African National Congress, Kamuzu Banda had "responded magnificently" and sent large sums of money despite his open links with Apartheid.
This is the Kamuzu Banda who befriended Whites at every official level, even loved part of Western lifestyles to merit the portrayal of “an eccentric leader in three-piece suit and homburg”. Yet, he did not smile at much of the nonsense of the Whites. He fought the British and remained a great friend of the Queen of England.
If Nkrumah started the liberation, and Mandela concluded it, Kamuzu was actively all there despite invisibly like the spirit of the age. But the Nkrumah whom Sam Nujoma agrees to have been “the Indomitable Lion of Africa” was a great leader. And in President Bingu wa Mutharika’s words, “It was Kamuzu’s rare leadership quality that led to Egyptian president Abdel Nasser to name him “Lion of Africa”.
Yet these great men were haunted by fear of the forces of ill-will. Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party as a result formed a military wing parallel to the state machinery. Our roaring Lion pounced and dragged home that too by forming Malawi Young Pioneers, a well trained and disciplined but ruthless military wing beside the red-shirted notoriously hardnosed Youth League.
Nkrumah was haunted by six attempts at his life. Once, a grenade was thrown into his convoy and Kamuzu must have been awakened by the life-begging cries of fractured souls, and the crimson carnage from which his friend survived.
Finally, Nkrumah was toppled in a coup while in flight on a peace mission to Vietnam where America was at war. Africa was shot in mid-flight on that day of a darkening sky, 24 February 1966. Africa stepped into a season of coups and civil wars for the years that followed.
Yet the American leadership must have been rejoicing. Recently declassified files now testify that the CIA had engineered the mid-flight coup with a smiling blessing from the British as Nkrumah was flying too high for the world. But the plot was delivered by local collaborators of Ghana, Nkrumah’s own brothers.
The shrewd and complex Kamuzu Banda clearly developed fears and became too suspicious of his own brothers. How could he tell whether they were not local collaborators? Kamuzu would fight anyone suspected of plotting to shoot down Malawi’s flight to a greater destiny, for Kamuzu paradoxically had the vision and welfare of the people. The fear of a mid-flight coup of his agenda must have made Kamuzu a dictator.
Malawians walked their dignity in his days. One international journalist remembers, “No matter how menial their occupation, Malawians have never thought of themselves as slaves. They were sages, unfazed by the arrogance of their wealthier neighbours.”
That season of the self-worth and the dignity of a people was eroded with the Bakili Muluzi flood of change when the national leader himself public bragged of being an international beggar.
As we remember Malawi’s Kamuzu Banda and international place in political liberation, it has become impossible now to see President Bingu wa Mutharika’s international place in Africa’s economic liberation. After years of talking about SADC and COMESA regional blocs whose land was hardly connected, Bingu has brought the Shire-Zambezi Water way that opens up countries that thought are landlocked, as countries in the region physically open to each other more than ever.
Bingu stood in Paris and told Europe to perceive and support Africa become “an economic partner in development” who should be supported to generate its capital rather than support Africa to play the beggar for ever. And this was a new African visionary of Africa speaking to the world. When Bingu fearlessly told the world at the United Nations to stop playing the hypocrite and accept the Republic of China into the fold of the world – and Malawi went into diplomatic ties with the RoC in the eyes of Mainland China, it was a vision of a new world coming from Malawi.
In seeing Bingu, I we remember Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda the international Statesman. So, the female Chewa Senior Chief whose tongue slipped into calling Bingu our “Ngwazi” (meaning fighter, liberator) must have wisely seen Africa rising with Bingu to the heights Kamuzu reached for before he fell into washed memories of a dictator.
Soon, the world is seeing through the eyes Bingu’s global an economic liberator and beacon of Africa who confesses, admires and walks the towering stature of Kamuzu the political liberator. Even Great Mandela Mandela warmly testifies Malawi’s “unbelievable” liberation wars fought in the storms of controversy.
For whatever his story, Kamuzu has a place in the Heart of Africa, in the storm of memories that blow away tears of seasons gone.
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About Me
- Dr. Bright.Molande
- University of Malawi, Malawi
- The most sustainable revolution takes place in the human mind. But revolution is a most abused word.